REVIEWS

Indre Gin and the Semiotics of Community
author Albertina Pisano
2025
 

I have been following Indre's work since 2017. At that time, I viewed her as a pioneer in the use of social media for choreography, even before it became a popular trend during the pandemic. Indre was already collaborating on choreography across geographies using digital technology and social media. One of her presentations during our master’s program involved a dance she co-created with her twin sister. The setting was entirely online, with the sisters creating dance together from different geographic locations while incorporating an element of randomness through music played by a radio. What seemed like an experiment in randomness instead resulted in a compelling exploration of collective creation. 

 

Through a common language established across time and space—between Lithuania and the UK, and between various movement vocabularies and aesthetic experiences of academic and battle dance—Indre began to develop a precise choreographic process. This process relied on theoretical experimentation rather than solely on the aesthetics of movement. That initial experiment evolved into a choreographic practice when Indre moved to Indonesia and continued creating dance across time and geographies. 

 

During the pandemic, the most innovative choreographers among us needed to find ways to keep moving our bodies together despite the inability to share the same physical space or environment. Indre's interest in experimentation led her to create a collective of dancers who would explore movement together, albeit in separate locations. The goal was to overcome the isolation that became even more pronounced during the pandemic and to truly co-create dance as a collective act. There were common movement ideas and cues that participants could follow, allowing for improvisation through a screen. This approach provided a shared experience of creation while also fostering collective reflection on that experience, offering the possibility of sharing personal insights within a collective framework. 

 

What interests Indre as a choreographer is the potential for collectivism in choreography, utilizing technology to transform dance into a profoundly collective experience. In 2025, I participated in a workshop organized by Indre and two Indonesian contemporary dancers, Augus and Enno, in Surakarta, Indonesia. The workshop took place in a cultural center and was attended by dance students and professionals. We were given tasks on pieces of paper: "What was dance when you were a child?" and "What is dance now?" As we responded to these prompts, random music from an online radio was played. Indre and her collaborators made it clear that no specific movement style was required, and there would be no movement input from the facilitators; the only directive was the question written on the paper.

 

For dancers accustomed to entering a workshop and immediately responding to movement, this approach was unsettling. Many of us stood in the space, trying to figure out how to respond with movement. Some began creating small movement patterns that quickly became repetitive, while others adopted a more theatrical approach, focusing on sensations and memories. 

 

What was intriguing about the workshop was that the requirement was not to produce interesting movement material but to truly reflect on the essence of dance and its meaning for us as dancers. With my background in philosophy, I wondered: was it possible to respond with our bodies to a theoretical question generated by our minds? Could we create a theoretical debate through our bodies? And was it necessary to do so? The possibilities of dance today can indeed extend from mere spectacle to profound philosophical inquiry.

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Reclaiming the Body’s Intelligence

author Mårten Spångberg
2025 

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When entering the room of one senses a quiet refusal. A refusal to perform, to please, to conform to the invisible architecture of dance as an institutional language. There is no stage, no front, no teacher. Only a scattering of bodies and a soft radio humming in the background, a fragment of music that might as well have been chosen by chance. What unfolds is less a performance than a collective experiment in disobedience—a radical decentering of authority, method, and mastery.

The piece, led by artists and educators Agus Margiyanto, Ieva Ginkevičiūtė, Indrė Gin, and Retno Sulistyorini, emerges from a shared research inquiry into what it means to unlearn dance. Presented as part of the ongoing project Reclaiming the Power of Dancing, it draws together participants from varied geographies and training backgrounds in a series of workshops that blur the line between pedagogy and performance. The experience is not choreographed in the conventional sense. Rather, it is choreographed by the questions that haunt it: What was dance to you when you were little? What is dance? What is dance now?

From the moment one steps into the space, the premise of dance as a structured language begins to dissolve. There is no technique to demonstrate, no correction to be made, no mirror to verify the self. Participants are invited to move, or not move, to remember, or to forget. The simplicity of the setup—music, space, and text—creates a field of uncertainty where the trained and the untrained body stand on equal ground. What unfolds is a subtle choreography of hesitation: small gestures, pauses, sudden bursts of laughter, bodies leaning into collective silence. The performers’ movements appear to arise not from the desire to express but from the slow recognition that their bodies already know more than their minds allow.

In this sense, The Unlearning Dance stages an inversion of dance education. It challenges the learned hierarchies that privilege certain lineages, techniques, and aesthetics—particularly those of Western modernity—and exposes how deeply institutionalised notions of skill and beauty shape our experience of the moving body. What Margiyanto, Ginkevičiūtė, Gin, and Sulistyorini propose is a form of epistemic resistance: a way of reclaiming movement from its own history of domestication.

The performance feels like a quiet rebellion against the authority of choreography, the choreographer, and the academy. By “deleting” the figure of the teacher, the piece dismantles the idea of knowledge as something transmitted from above. Instead, knowledge emerges laterally, in gestures exchanged between bodies. This redistribution of agency turns the space into a field of collective authorship. At times, one participant might lead, intentionally or not, and others might follow—but the leadership constantly shifts, eludes, dissolves. What remains is a dense web of attention, an ecology of sensing.

There is a haunting beauty in the way The Unlearning Dance transforms uncertainty into material. The participants’ bodies are visibly negotiating the friction between habit and spontaneity, between the known and the unknown. One can sense how years of training—balletic posture, contemporary weight shifts, traditional gestures—surface and dissolve, like memories being rewritten in real time. A hand lifts, then hesitates, as if waiting for permission from an older choreography that no longer exists. A foot drags against the floor, uncertain whether it belongs to a dance or to an act of refusal.

Such moments make visible what one can call embodied memory: the archive of gestures that live inside the body, often unconsciously, shaped by institutions, cultures, and histories of discipline. By attending to these memories, the performers not only recall their personal dance histories but also expose the broader politics of representation inscribed in them. The “unlearning” here is not a romantic call for purity or return to origin; it is a critical act, an unmaking of the body as a product of ideology.

One of the most striking elements of the context is its insistence on decentralisation—not only of authority but also of geography. The project’s transnational framework, spanning Europe and Southeast Asia, complicates the idea of a single dance canon. During the workshop-performance, references to Javanese, Lithuanian, and Western contemporary dance practices collide and coexist without hierarchy. This simultaneity creates a living dialogue between distinct corporeal epistemologies: how rhythm, ritual, and repetition operate differently in each context, yet share an underlying capacity to reconfigure meaning through movement.

In this way, The Unlearning Dance becomes an act of decolonisation—not by simply inserting “non-Western” forms into a Western frame, but by dismantling the frame itself. The work resists the commodification of difference so often seen in globalised dance festivals, instead foregrounding the political and affective labour of reclaiming one’s embodied voice. Margiyanto’s and Sulistyorini’s background in Indonesian traditional dance practices and choreography, Ginkevičiūtė’s pedagogical research, and Gin’s cross-cultural collaborations converge here not as a hybrid spectacle but as a conversation in motion.

At several moments during the performance, the atmosphere thickens. The radio fades into static; the room becomes heavy with the sound of bodies breathing. A participant begins to speak softly, recounting a childhood memory of dancing in secret. Another starts to mimic the rhythm of that voice with a slow circular movement. The scene grows fragile, intimate. There is no applause, no conclusion. Instead, the performance folds into reflection—participants writing down what surfaced during the process, or simply sitting in silence. The absence of resolution feels deliberate, a refusal of the closure that performance usually demands.

What the collective achieves here is not only aesthetic but epistemological. By transforming a research workshop into a performative event, The Unlearning Dance reframes research itself as a form of performance. The act of inquiry—posing questions, testing, observing—becomes choreographic. Conversely, movement becomes a mode of thinking. This oscillation between reflection and embodiment creates a fertile tension: theory is not external to practice but internal, lived, felt through muscle, skin, and breath.

There is also a quiet ethics embedded in the work. The artists’ rejection of the therapeutic frame—while maintaining a space of vulnerability and care—positions the performance as neither therapy nor spectacle, but a form of mutual inquiry. The questions on the posters (“What is dance now?”) hang in the air long after